Saffron Skies
by thebluefrenchhorn
Summary: Andromeda Tonks fulfills her daughter's dying wish in a field of sunflowers, hands covered in dirt, and the Messiah of the Wizarding World at her side.


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 ** **Saffron Skies****

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* * *

It is only days after the battle that the ministry arrives at the Tonks' family front porch. They stand there awkwardly for a few moments, glancing around at the blatantly muggle neighborhood, almost brazen with their staring, because apparently even the __good guys__ could be prejudice, before demanding the dead body of Nymphadora Tonks.

Andromeda takes one look at them before slamming the door in their faces. Her features are drawn and pale and hold not a trace of makeup but she gazes down upon the riff-raff of an auror team sent to collect her daughter's body with the severity of a queen. Merlin dammit it all. She has already lost her husband to this war and she will die before she fails her daughter's last wish.

Harry comes by a week later and she says as much to him, shrewd eyes narrowed upon the slip of boy he makes as the overstuffed pillows—Ted, that bloody Hufflepuff that couldn't help but make her fall in love with him, had insisted on them—of the living room couch swallow him whole. It is only because of his position as Teddy's godfather that she lets him in and it is something that would do him well to remember. The Savior of the Wizarding World or not, Harry Potter has always been someone's lap dog, if not Dumbledore's than Shacklebolt's, and that is something Andromeda will never forget.

So when Harry, with his gravity-defying hair and sheepish grin, begins pitching the most wretched of propaganda spiels, lamenting about how Nymphadora deserves to be buried with the rest of the fallen war heroes in the mass memorial the ministry is putting on, Andromeda socks him in the eye. He is the Chosen One, Defeater of Voldemort, and she punches him in the face, snapping his head to the side with enough force to leave a mark. It feels bloody amazing.

And she does not stop there.

No, she strides up to him, finger jabbing at his figure with the madness of the entire Black family held within her dark gaze. "My daughter, will not become another figurehead for a government that has failed its people," she says, her voice laced with ice. "I supported the liberation of muggleborns and I supported my daughter, but I did not support the war. Not when it sent school children to be slain by wizards three times their age.

Harry is silent but Andromeda can see a brand of dawning understanding alighting within his eyes. It's a feeble flicker, but she catches it nonetheless, left only to hopelessly wonder who has burnt someone as young him, because war heroes or not, people with eyes like that have felt far worse things than torture.

Perhaps she has judged him wrong.

She is old and stubborn, though, and while she certainly doesn't regret what she has said, she understands, as distant as it may be, what it was like to be young once.

"Nymphadora wanted to be buried in a field of sunflowers," she says, offering up the words like an olive branch.

Harry takes it gently and offers his own in return. "Dumbledore planned my own death for me."

The admission does not take Andromeda by surprise. She had never been the most trusting of the old wizard. Perhaps it was an inclination ingrained within her from her Slytherin heritage or the Black blood coursing through her veins, but Albus Dumbledore has always struck her as a terribly twisted mystery onto himself.

It is not unbelievable that he orchestrated the death of a schoolboy—for the greater good, of course, because Andromeda damn well knows about who exactly he had gotten his favorite little catch phrase from—from beyond the grave.

She doesn't say this but she doesn't need to for Harry to understand. It is written within the slight twitch of her lips and woven within the sharpness of her words.

"You understand why I'm burying her on my terms then?" she continues.

Harry dips his head. His hand moves to scratch the back of his head, before ruffling his hair with a smile. Andromeda's heart stills at the action. It was one of the things that Ted used to do that made her fall in love with him, back when they were still Hogwarts students and he would smile down at her in the light frost, nose red and the upper half of his body adorned with a monstrosity of an oversized yellow scarf that she had attempted to knit.

Andromeda wonders when she'll stop seeing echoes of the people she loves in others. She doesn't know if she ever will. It might just be a part of grief.

But Harry is here, and while he might not be someone special to her, he could be.

Andromeda smiles at this and it is a bitter, little thing of a woman who has outlived not only her own generation but the generation of her children. "What will you tell Kingsley?"

"Kingsley is smart," Harry responds, "he can assume as much for himself."

He tilts his head upwards to meet her gaze with blinding green eyes. They are not Lily's eyes. They are both too bright and too dark and, most of all, undeniably Harry. And that is important because Andromeda Tonks would not have invited Lily Potter to attend her daughter's funeral. Harry Potter, however, is a different matter altogether.

"Nest Tuesday, I'm going to the garden between this neighborhood and the next," she says simply and she knows Harry will read between the lines for the words left unspoken. "You are welcome to come."

* * *

She buries her daughter in a field of sunflowers.

There are hundreds of them, smiling upwards to the brilliant blue of the afternoon sky, and she buries her right in the middle of them.

Beside her is the silent figure of a boy that has seen too much and felt too little love, their hands patting the dirt firmly within the earth together.

"Things will get better," she whispers, "things will get better for Teddy."

"And we will bring him here," he says back to her, "to both of them."

His eye linger upon a mound of dirt beside the one they are currently sculpting and his gaze is gentle and warm and full of love for a wolf that wore the face of a man.

"To both of them," she agrees and the tears silently drip down her face.

* * *

When Nymphadora was seven she said she wanted to live in a garden forever.

Andromeda fulfills this promise to her in a field of sunflowers.


End file.
